Such barriers are used primarily as vehicle barriers, in particular as parking lot barriers for controlling the entrance to and exit from parking areas.
To prevent damage, or at least excessive damage, to a vehicle that moves against the barrier arm in the blocking position, parking lot barriers have a rated breaking point in the barrier arm.
However, hours and days often pass before the broken barrier arm is repaired, especially in unmanned parking facilities where the break of the barrier arm is frequently noticed quite late.
Since following vehicles can pass a broken parking lot barrier without paying, considerable losses result for the operator. In car parks where data carriers are used for actuating the barrier, further costs arise from the loss of the data carriers, particularly in the case of costly data carriers such as cards or coins provided with chips, transponders and similar electronic devices.
A broken barrier arm also means that control over the occupancy of the parking facility is lost. Furthermore, drivers can go in the wrong direction so that if a barrier has broken at the exit, for example, the exit can also be used as an entrance. If the entrance barrier is broken, the staff can moreover attempt fraud by collecting from exiting vehicles at the exit barrier. Apart from that, when the barrier arm of a parking lot barrier is broken, an attendance effort often lasting hours is required until all vehicles that have entered via the exit or entrance without any parking authorization have left the parking facility again.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,470,626 discloses a barrier of the type stated at the outset. An arm is pivoted on each side of the barrier arm to swing around the horizontal axis and form a mount for the barrier arm swinging around a vertical axis upon forceful opening. The known barrier has a complicated structure.
The problem of the invention is to form a conventional barrier with modifications as slight as possible such that its function is not affected when it is opened forcefully by a vehicle or in another way.
This is obtained by the barrier according to the invention.